Where do rugby codes' strongholds turn to rules? At the 'Barassi Line', of course...

Have you ever wondered – in this expansionist era of football – precisely where the border sits between rugby country and Aussie rules territory?

At what point on the map does the domain of "cross-country wrestling" cede its authority to "aerial ping pong"?

The Barassi Line: A plaque has even been erected in the town of Corowa-Wahgunyah.Credit:Corowa Free Press

It's all so blurry now. These days there are four "frontier" clubs playing AFL in the northern states, and Melbourne has its own union team (the Rebels) and league team (the Storm). So what does it look like – this great, imaginary dotted line between codes – if it even exists?

Where does one leave that heathen northern world of crossbars and uprights and enter the Great Southern Land of the Long White Posts?

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Ian Turner in 1978.

One academic thought he had the problem solved half a century ago. His name was Ian Alexander Hamilton Turner.

"Australia is divided by a deep cultural rift between the north and the south, known as 'the Barassi line'," Turner once boomed. "It runs between Canberra, Broken Hill, Birdsville and Maningrida, and it divides Australia between rugby and rules."

The line was part of a tongue-in-cheek speech the Monash University associate professor delivered (and tweaked) almost annually between 1965 and 1978.

Turner named his fictitious geographical barrier for the great Ron Barassi because, he reasoned, no one north of the line would know anything of our beloved southern code ... except the name of its then most famous player.

The footy professor: Ian Turner.

Ronald Dale Barassi, who turns 80 on Saturday, was also (not coincidentally) one of the earliest spruikers of Australian rules as a national game. He is no stranger to the concept of "his" line either. He heard of it many years ago and was both "surprised and flattered". (He pointed out this week that if recognition in the north was a factor, it has mostly to do with his unusual surname.)

"If my name had been Smith, or Jones," he said, "I doubt 'the line' would have held."

The "Barassi Line" was evidently a play on the "Brisbane Line" – an abandoned WWII defence plan to sacrifice all land north of the Queensland capital to any invading Japanese forces. The witty riff on our past makes sense, too, for Turner was a historian. But he was also much more. The biography of the man once known as "the footy professor" is anything but bland.

Born in 1922 in East Malvern, he was called up for WWII service in 1942, served in Queensland, and was demoted for "insubordination".

He studied history at Melbourne University, where he was part of "the push" and co-editor of Farrago. He was also a Communist Party member, and once gained "proletarian industrial experience" by cleaning trains for the railway union. (He was eventually expelled from the party.)

But he came into his own in the 1960s, on the Clayton campus of Monash University, a hotbed of political activism. There he thrived, diving into colonial and indigenous history and the labour movement, lecturing in corduroy pants and an army surplus jacket.

It was there also that he began giving his annual "Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture", a quasi-serious, faux-joking dissertation every grand final week. He delivered it while wearing a Richmond jumper, beanie and shorts, perhaps with a pie in one hand and a can of Emu beer in the other – or a cigar and a bottle of Rosella tomato sauce. He had bushy hair and a beard, and would invoke Cicero and Zeus in the same breath as Dyer and Whitten.

The speeches sound ridiculous at first blush, but they were part of campus lore and even the fabric of Melbourne. Fairfax journalist Damien Murphy was once a student of Turner's and later covered his speeches for The Age.

"It was the era when middle-class Melbourne embraced football, and opinion leaders realised there was more going on in the game," Murphy says. "Educated free thinkers began to see that football was quite vital to our sense of who we are."

Conservative journalist Keith Dunstan – founder of the equally facetious "Anti Football League" – came to the early lectures. Rob Hess, one of Australia's foremost sports historians, studied under Turner.

Graphic: Stephen Kiprillis

Hess believes the Barassi Line is "more porous than definitive" but he would never disparage Turner, who he said had an aura, "street cred", and fierce academic rigour. Turner was one of the very first – with Geoffrey Blainey – to explore the game as a scholar.

"He was the inspiration for me doing my PhD," Hess says, remembering a man sitting at the lectern, waxing intellectual on footy. "I tell my students this today – 'One lecture can change your life' – because that's what he did for me."

Turner lived in Lennox Street, Richmond, in an archetypal inner-city bohemian haunt. Before and after every Tigers game he held epic parties. Dozens would start the day there eating cheese, and sausages in bread, drinking beer, then walk to the match, returning later to celebrations or commiserations characterised by gallons of red wine, beautiful women and debate.

Turner seemingly knew everyone, hosting politicians and folk musicians at lively salons. He had his portrait painted by several mates including Clifton Pugh, Noel Counihan and Fred Williams.

He was a pioneer – a central figure in the moment we began intellectualising the game. John Powers published The Coach in 1978. David Williamson staged The Club in 1977. Williamson was also a friend – part of "next generation" inspired by Turner.

"He was already a legendary, dominant figure of the Melbourne left," Williamson said. "We felt privileged to be part of the conversation with these tribal elders."

Turner was a lover of jazz and Picasso, Sidney Nolan and Patrick White, when having such taste was in itself almost a progressive act. He wrote children's nursery rhymes, published poems, produced cultural essays for Rennie Ellis photographs. He wrote several books on politics and history and sport.

He was married twice, had three kids and planned to wed a third time, to Leonie Sandercock, who now lives in Canada. When he died he was seven chapters into a football history that Sandercock published in 1981. Up Where, Cazaly? still remains a seminal text.

The Barassi Line, it turns out, is probably a mere throwaway line in his resume. Yet it holds our focus. It is deep in the Riverina? How far above the Mallee?

In the mind of Turner, the line stretched in a flat curving arc from Eden in coastal NSW all the way up to Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.

One location it is imagined to have intersected is the Murray town of Corowa-Wahgunyah, which erected a plaque there only 18 months ago, to commemorate the divide. (Barassi attended the unveiling.)

It concluded: "While significant investment has been made by major football leagues to expand their regional boundaries, the Barassi Line by its traditional definition has remained intact."

One hopes this would please Turner, who is no longer with us.

In his early days at Monash he suffered a catastrophic heart attack, and had other attacks there over the years. The university named a new halls of residence for him only months ago.

The story of his last fatal gasp is best told by his best friend, the founding editor of literary journal Overland, the late Stephen Murray-Smith, who paid tribute in a special 1979 edition – a memorial to Turner from his mates.

A group of them used to camp together at Erith Island in the Bass Strait, and they headed there again before Christmas in 1978. Turner was apparently happy as he set up his tent, chairs, lamp and bed, and his piles of books. He slept long hours in his nook within the woods. No big hikes or cray-potting expeditions – just reading in a chair, caressing the wind.

The night before he died they all shared a bottle of champagne to celebrate his 12th "re-birthday" – the anniversary of his first major heart attack and "clinical death" at St Vincent's. They ate fish and talked until late.

On Wednesday, December 27, they played beach cricket on a short pitch, with a tennis ball and improvised bats.

At 2.30pm, Turner, 56, made a stylish stroke from the crease, ran 10 paces to the bowler's end, paused, and fell. When he collapsed it seemed like a prank. It was worth a few laughs in the moment, but he was dead before he hit the sand.

They attempted resuscitation for 45 minutes, then carried his body to a grassy shelf by the beach. They rigged a tarpaulin above and hitched a flag to half mast.

Murray-Smith said it was an enviable way to go.

"Death came amid the splash of waves at his feet, the cries of gulls, sunshine and wind, the laughter of children and the clapping of hands. As he fell he was cradled in the arms of those who loved him and whom he loved. His flame was extinguished instantaneously, as by a mighty wind."